In the last few years, most companies have realized that social media is more than just the latest fad in communicating to the under-30 demographic, and is instead a generator of real dollars and cents value for their businesses.
Fewer companies, however, are aware of the value of a new technology called "social login," which allows visitors to a website to log in using their Facebook, Google, Twitter, or other social media account rather than having to register a new one. In fact, social login can be a huge marketing "force multiplier" in every business's two core tasks: acquiring customers, and selling them products and services.
Take customer acquisition. Most companies today require visitors to their websites to register — i.e., create an account — in order to purchase products or services or post comments. Registering is essential for online businesses because it's the only way those businesses can learn about the needs, interests, and desires of their customers. And besides, advertisers demand it.
Yet as Blue Research found during a study we commissioned (and as the trade journal eMarketerand other news sites reported earlier this year) three out of every four Internet users leave a website rather than take the trouble to register a new account. Among those who do register, 76 percent say they give false or incomplete information, which, of course, defeats the whole purpose of registering. As for those who are already registered but forget their login information, nearly half admit to leaving a website rather than going to the trouble of resetting their password or answering security questions. This is especially true for the lucrative new segment of smartphone users — 40% of all social media users — for whom registering would mean having to awkwardly thumb-type data on a tiny virtual keyboard.
That's a lot of potential customers walking out your door (or refusing to come inside in the first place) — three-quarters of them, to be precise — all because they hate to register.
Social login, which is available from a variety of vendors or can be custom-built in house, provides an alternative, and a highly-profitable one at that. With one click, the more than one billion people using social networks today can enter your website or online store with no new registration, no need for a new password, and no hassle.
Not only do you potentially gain many more customers, but research by Forrester, Nielsen andothers shows that each one gained via social login is far more valuable than traditionally-registered users. Indeed, social login boosts conversion rates up to 50 percent, and, though the data comes from Facebook itself, it appears that these users tend to spend more time on a website and purchase more than non-social login users.
But even more important, social login gives retailers and marketers access to very rich demographic and psychographic data from visitors' Facebook or LinkedIn accounts that they can't get anywhere else, including the user's location, interests, hobbies, purchasing habits, and cultural tastes — as well as those of everyone in his or her social network. Although each user has the right to control which social profile data is given to any one company, the data shared gives companies a potent advantage in personalizing content and product recommendations to each user's interests and in targeting their marketing efforts more successfully.
But the greatest advantage of social login for businesses may be something called "social sharing." This is not limited simply to "liking" a product within the Facebook network, but rather allows users to share something they have done on your site with a wide range of friends across multiple social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Yahoo. Additional value comes from giving the user the ability to add personal commentary to what they are sharing — in other words, endorsements in their own words.
This obviously generates a lot of word-of-mouth referrals. In fact, our data shows that each login visitor using social share generates an average of 13 referral visitors to a website.
This is why we call social login a marketing "force multiplier." In a world in which people spend more time with peers on social networks than in any other online activity — and in which 58 percent of consumers research products online before buying — the indicator of a trusted product has become "a person like you" rather than corporate advertising and promotion.
Just ask Interscope Geffen A&M Records, the division of Universal Music Group that hosts such powerhouse artists as Lady Gaga, which used social login so successfully to attract more visitors to its artist websites that it stopped using traditional registration methods entirely. Or ask Citysearch, which found that each user comment shared back to his or her social network was viewed by an average of 40 other people and generated 28 clicks back to Citysearch.
This is why we call social login a marketing "force multiplier." In a world in which people spend more time with peers on social networks than in any other online activity — and in which 58 percent of consumers research products online before buying — the indicator of a trusted product has become "a person like you" rather than corporate advertising and promotion.
Just ask Interscope Geffen A&M Records, the division of Universal Music Group that hosts such powerhouse artists as Lady Gaga, which used social login so successfully to attract more visitors to its artist websites that it stopped using traditional registration methods entirely. Or ask Citysearch, which found that each user comment shared back to his or her social network was viewed by an average of 40 other people and generated 28 clicks back to Citysearch.
It's not just entertainment companies or online guides, of course, that are beginning to deploy social login. Although available for less than three years now, social login is gaining rapid penetration among web businesses, even among retailers like Sears who have sometimes been be cautious about deploying a technology that might theoretically leave them vulnerable in the event of an outage at Facebook or one of the other social login origin sites.
To be sure, while the Facebooks and Googles of the web are investing a lot more money in bullet-proof data centers than your business is, this still leaves you theoretically vulnerable to a service interruption on one of these heavily-trafficked networks. Also bear in mind that when users opt for social login, they are presented with a permissions screen that explicitly asks for access to certain types of information about them, and some users may feel that sharing such information is not worth the benefit of easier login and a more personalized experience on your website, where products can be tailored to their interests. That's why many sites also offer traditional registration via the user's own site-specific login name and password to keep them within the fold.
In terms of penetration to date, Facebook reported last year that its social login option was already deployed on 2 million websites. Our own platform, Janrain Engage, which allows users to login not only with Facebook but via 21 additional social networks as well, is deployed on more than 350,000 websites. There is no reliable data on how many websites have undertaken the non-trivial challenge of building their own interfaces to even one social network, let alone enough of them to encompass the fragmented social media preferences of users today, where even the largest social network (Facebook) garners only 39 percent of all social media logins.
But what is clear is that social login is rapidly accelerating the greatest shift in the way business is conducted since the emergence of e-commerce itself 15 years ago.
As a new study by e-commerce pioneer IBM noted, "The inflection point created by social media represents a permanent change in the nature of customer relationships. [Companies that] successfully harness this new source of insight will be in a strong position to increase revenues and build new brand value."
Social login is the latest tool for leveraging the enormous power of social media.
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